“Six PhD students at Columbia University‘s Department of Computer Science have developed Cider, an OS compatibility architecture capable of running iOS apps on Android,” Emil Protalinski reports for TNW. “Rather than using a strict virtual machine, they achieved the feat by running domestic and foreign binaries on the same device.”

“They leverage binary compatibility techniques such as compile-time code adaptation and diplomatic functions,” Protalinski reports. “This means Cider can copy the libraries and frameworks it needs and convince an app’s code that it is running on Apple’s XNU kernel rather than Android’s Linux kernel.”

“The performance is less than stellar, but this is to be expected given the extra cost of diplomatic function calls and a currently incomplete OpenGL ES implementation. Nevertheless, using an OS compatibility layer for native execution of iOS apps on Android is an impressive feat,” Protalinski reports. “Android apps still function on the device even with the OS abstraction layer. The team says it did not encounter any fundamental limitations regarding its approach that would result in compatibility problems between the two operating systems.”

MacDailyNews Take: Yet another item for Apple’s legal team to keep an eye on.

Apple Inc. iOS Software License Agreement
Section 2C: You may not, and you agree not to or enable others to, copy (except as expressly permitted by this License), decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, attempt to derive the source code of, decrypt, modify, or create derivative works of the iOS Software or any services provided by the iOS Software or any part thereof (except as and only to the extent any foregoing restriction is prohibited by applicable law or by licensing terms governing use of open-source components that may be included with the iOS Software).

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19 Comments

This is one of those mental masturbation projects. I’m sure the team that did this achieved great satisfaction from accomplishing the goal.

However, practical value here is simply non-existent. Even if we assume the applications will run reasonably well (which is a big assumption, considering the massive hardware fragmentation of the Android platform, with myriad of chipsets, screen resolutions and OS variations), there is simply NO legal way to get any iOS app outside of the AppStore, which simply does not exist for Android, and cannot be moved into that environment.

In other words, you could run iOS apps on Android, but there is no way to actually get those apps into an Android phone.

I think this is well below anyone’s radar, and deep within the ‘academic research’ category. There is no commercial gain for anyone here, its sole purpose is to find out if it could be done. These kinds of efforts are even further away (beyond fringe) form Cydia / jailbreaking concept. At least those have some semblance of a user base (in other words, there ARE some ordinary people actually jailbreaking and sideloading apps downloaded form Cydia). There will likely never be any ordinary people trying to run iOS apps on Android, so Apple will likely completely ignore this.

I’m pretty sure the researchers are fully aware of Apple’s “walled garden”, as well as Android’s security.

I have no doubt, these are some clever people and the only motivation for this is exactly what you said: exercise in code cleverness (or, as I called it in my first post here, mental masturbation). Nobody in their clear mind has any illusion that this would have any practical benefits or advantages.

But what possible advantage would you gain from such a functionality? It is not like there are tons of apps on Android that are unavailable on iOS (like in the Windows / Mac world). There really are NO Android apps that are unavailable on iOS (that anyone would want to have anyway).

Such a project would be even more academic than the one from this article.

I don’t know that there’s an advantage. I just like HAVING stuff. For instance, on my MacBook Pro, I have Windows 7 Professional, Ubuntu (whatever number), and Elementary OS all in VirtualBox. Is there an advantage? Nope. Is it cool that I can simply HAVE them? Yup. Occasionally, there are things I enjoy, liek old LCD handheld emulators (only found on Windows).

In a way, this looks like one of those hacks that allows old Atari 8-bit computers to display colour. There is a legend (or a true story) about the demo of the first such hack. When the team of hackers showed it to a friend, the friend was not sure what was he watching and what is so special. “It is not supposed to be possible!” was the answer… To anyone from outside, there was nothing special about a hack that showed some colours on a computer screen, regardless of how much coding effort went into tricking hardware into displaying colour. Remarkable effort, no practical use.

This is fantastic. The media analyshits will have a field day with this, feeding into the mantra of Dooooooom.
New advertising agencies will pop up overnight and “I made 19.00$ this month transferring Mac Apps to Android for people too stupid to know the difference and you can too. Here’s how…” adds will start to appear at MDN

Entire industries…”want to buy a nice apple app wittle boy?” will spring up and soon people will be spying on the NSA from android phones until Judge Kohtex orders the execution of all those Apple employees who dared create a platform that could be copied.